Art & Art History News - December 15, 2021

Brianne Cohen has been awarded a CU Boulder Center of Humanities & the Arts Faculty Fellowship for Spring 2023.

During the fellowship, she will research and write her book manuscript, The Empathic Lens: Contemporary Art, Ecology, and Kinship in Southeast Asia, which is the first study to explore a 21^st-century efflorescence of artistic projects in Southeast Asia that urge widescale publics to prevent socio-environmental violence by envisioning ecological empathy through more sustainable, Indigenous cosmologies. This artwork employs the camera lens not only to document destruction of local landscapes, but also to galvanize feeling for inanimate matter, plants, animals, and humans through the imagining of more embodied, interconnected forms of kinship, an understanding of familial, environmental relations central to Indigenous knowledge. The Empathic Lens analyzes and introduces arts-and-humanities audiences to this body of environmentally engaged, camera-based artwork, which presents an alternative, more ethical picture for planetary living through the lens of sustainable, Indigenous worldviews.

Image: Khvay Samnang, Rubber Man (2014)

Yumi Janairo Roth has also been awarded a CU Boulder Center of Humanities & the Arts Faculty Fellowship for Spring 2023.

Her upcoming project: Filipiniana Americana is a play on words and the associations we have with terms like “Americana” and, to a lesser extent in the US, “Filipiniana.” As categories, “Americana” and “Filipiniana” seem to describe quintessential aspects of each culture, yet, when combined, what can the new, hybrid term suggest? Though Filipinos were present and represented in the American West from the late 19th c. (e.g. the 1899 Greater America Exposition in Omaha, NE and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show), the myth of the American West does not include Filipinos. As an artist, I am interested in the forms that these stories and knowledge can take, from objects to video to site-based installation. Filipiniana Americana describes the larger project of locating the intersection between “Filipinoness” and “Americanness” couched in the American West.